Congressional investigators on Friday called on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google to produce a sweeping list of financial records and business documents, opening a new chapter in a "top-to-bottom" antitrust review of the tech industry.

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(C) 2009 – 2014

2014 in Tech

Foremost a very happy new year to you all, it was a great 2013 for tech with Big data leading the race.. Predicting 2014, especially in the ultra-fast-moving tech world, is a risky business but for me its also great fun merrily pulling predictions out of thin air with my ample experience I go through daily, but lets give it a shot which will snap the year ahead.

Mobile phone penetration in emerging markets has resulted in traditional mobile phone players getting squeezed and being unable to compete with Apple and Samsung at the high end, as well as struggling to differentiate from aggressive new vendors, most notably Huawei and ZTE. so per all those saying you may expect 3 of the top 5 mobile handset vendors will be Chinese. The same lies true with penetration to mobile apps like wechat, whatsapp, snapchat, viber etc.. with companies like facebook, google plus, loosing there ground mintuely they will be eyeing ways to extend there userbase and with more smartphones today then a laptop or desktop…

Big data will continue its dominace demand will reach >4 million jobs globally, but only one-third of those jobs will be filled. An important aspect of the challenge in filling these jobs lies in the fact that enterprises need people with new skills data management, analytics and business expertise and non-traditional skills necessary for extracting the value of Big Data, as well as artists and designers for data visualization.

Recent data from Forrester Research shows that Web Content Management and e-commerce are the top two priorities for digital executives. Next year, I believe the lines between these two priorities will blur. Customers want the opportunity to review great content while shopping online, and visa versa. Companies will strive to blend content and commerce so customers can learn more about a product, read reviews and interact with other customers or customer service representatives before making a purchasing decision.

Companies Learning how to be agile to drive toward an integrated customer experience across content, community and commerce are the ones who will succeed in 2014. Delivering an integrated digital experience requires the ability to integrate social business into the customer journey across websites, mobile devices and customer communities. When done effectively, this integration allows the brand to own their story and the customer experience, from the information gathering phase through to the purchase decision.

Welcome super Personalization. Content service providers will be able to model your behavior more and more accurately. You might say this has been happening since the days of Pandora. However, with new technologies the content will be customized based on the user, day/time, temporal trends, device (phone / tablet / TV), connectivity (WiFi, Fiber or LTE/3G etc) etc. Now, you can enjoy content on your device without having to turn the knobs.

“The biggest disruptor that we’re sure about is the arrival of big data and machine intelligence everywhere. The ability to find people, to talk specifically to them, to judge them, to rank what they’re doing, to decide what to do with your products… (it) changes every business globally.” –– Eric Schmidt, Chairman, Google

Sick of hearing about patent lawsuits between big-name tech companies? Bad luck – 2014 is going to bring more of them, after a relative lull in 2013. The part of Nokia that isn’t being sold to Microsoft is sharpening its patent portfolio, and has begun exercising it successfully against HTC. Next in line is Google (particularly Google Maps) and other Android handset makers. Apple and Samsung will also be back in a Californian court in March, in a second trial in which each is asserting five patents in Apple’s case, all relating to function, not “how it looks”. Samsung’s list includes two standards-essential patents (SEPs) which it’s obliged to license, so it’s hard to see it prevailing on those.

With luck, 2014 will be the year that wearables actually become wearable rather than being nagging devices that hassle you to take more steps to meet your “daily exercise quota”. The key problem is crossing the gulf between being “something you wear”, and “something you want to be seen wearing”.

We’ll see the app store for Google Glass open early this year, and so will finally start to see what wearable, immersive technology will be capable of once developers start to explore the device fully to a wider audience. Expect to see Google working hard to make consumers feel more comfortable with the concept of pervasive image and video recording, challenging and shifting the norm of what is socially acceptable.

Bitcoins are not my game, even being a analyst its hard for me to understand its in and out, not sure if it really a non transparent bubble ready to explode anytime for someone greediness.. I guarantee the same to even my readers keep away from this before u get burnt not sure when the next government is going to crack this down…

3D-printing trend has huge implications now anyone can run a small manufacturing business from the comforts of a small table at home. This will give rise to “small lot manufacturing”, where you create highly customized products for a small bunch of friends and buyers. As they say, everything can now be “Made to Order”.

Microsoft is going to go through big changes in 2014: the arrival of only its third chief executive, replacing Steve Ballmer, comes as its revenue streams and business models are under growing attack. Mobile computing is becoming a tsunami, eroding the traditional reliance on the desktop and Office. Apple is on its third chief executive if you only include Steve Jobs and John Sculley. Tim Cook’s genius at operations shows in how Apple is now making scores of different versions of the iPhone for different markets, yet everyone thinks there’s only one. Google is only on its second chief executive (and even he was the original one). It’s still a relatively young company, but its rapid growth has seen Larry Page reining in some projects that haven’t been core to what Google does – collect information and collate it. Google+ is core obviously due to FB rivalry; Google Reader wasn’t not sure why lots of users lost with it. And selling adverts is the ultimate core. Quite where Google Glass fits into this isn’t yet clear; nor is Motorola, which loses huge amounts of money while selling fewer handsets each quarter.

2013 Google’s Chromebooks accounted for 21 percent of all consumer laptop and 10 percent of all business laptop sales in the US . Couple of Chromebook models were right up there on Amazon’s list of top selling items for the year. Which is amazing, given that Chrome OS was till recently written off as ‘nothing more than a browser’ and did not register anywhere on the popularity charts. But the truth is, these days everything from your computer to your phones tend to become useless without a data connection. So a trend, connected to the cloud-based future, is that computers will become lower-spec and cheaper. And such cheaper computers will be hugely popular.

We can go and on, there are lot more trends that can be talked about. How about your predictions in the comments section